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Comment by ndesaulniers | Hacker News Reader

> Spam the Ctrl-T (new tab) key for a while. See the difference?

And that's why browser vendors can never win. Too many cases to optimize for; if you don't get every extremely contrived (non) use case right, it's off to twitter/hn-comments-section to complain. FFS

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I don't think having a lot of tabs open is a contrived use case. I have over a hundred tabs open in Firefox, and that's been pretty standard for me for at least a year.

How can this possibly be effective? What are that many tabs useful for?

~50 is normal for me by the end of a day, and I close my browser daily. I'd say it isn't unusual for info-heavy work.

I'm home now, and have been online for ~2 hours. Gmail, Twitter, 5 JIRA tabs, 10 Jupyter notebooks, 5 stackoverflow, 2 python doc pages, 1 javadoc page, 2 Wikipedia pages, 2 Kaggle pages, Hacker news.

30 tabs, and I haven't really read any news yet.

Basically some people use tabs as glorified bookmarks. It feels like something has to be invented that unite bookmarks, tabs and speed dials.

That's me. Tabs are for short term stuff I want to check out, bookmarks for saving potentially useful/interesting stuff for the future.

Since Firefox now only reloads tabs on demand after a restart, it's not resource-heavy to keep many tabs open if one occasionally restarts the browser.

I use it the same way but it was bugging me so I installed an add-on called TooManyTabs and you can set a limit to the amount of tabs you can have opened.

I also reserve some time to clean them up about once a week, I start with the oldest tab and "take care of it", sometimes it's just a news story I want to read, sometimes it's something I kept opened because of the information on that page.

If I don't do that I will have a thousand tabs opened and will never actually do anything about it.

I use it more as a glorified low priority to do list. For example some page I was reading (from HN) linked to a recommended article "How to Build Stable Systems" (https://medium.com/@jlouis666/how-to-build-stable-systems-6f...). I ctrl-clicked the link to open it in a new tab, because I'd like to read the article eventually even though I don't have time at this particular moment. So when I have a little bit of time I'll work through reading/dealing with my open tabs.

Open all the blue links on a Wikipedia article in tabs. When you are done, move to the next tab and repeat. After a while, you will have hundreds of tabs. Read them all and you will gain general knowledge on a subject that will be much better than if you were to read only the first article.

That's only Wikipedia. I do the same things with forums, documentation, stackoverflow, etc.

No, but "having a lot of tabs open is a contrived use case" is not the same as having a browser be responsive while "spamming ctrl-t."

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